


hallowed be thy name

by gleed



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Catholic School, Child Abuse, M/M, Smoking, the non-con is only suggested, there's nothing graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 21:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5602387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gleed/pseuds/gleed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man, but at the age of fifteen, he’d considered the existence of angels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hallowed be thy name

**Author's Note:**

> I'm British so when I write football, I mean what in America is soccer. Just a heads up.

Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man.

Or so he told himself, bound in a grey shirt and board rigid blazer, doing up his tie in the morning in front of a mirror, shoulder to shoulder with the three other boys he shared a dorm with. He held his mind to the direction of an agnostic, leaning atheist light even as he tapped down the cold, lonely corridors in tightly laced school shoes. I just don’t really believe that stuff was his own personal mantra, despite knowing the words Our father who art in Heaven through to Amen as though they were ingrained upon his chest, on the inside of his eyelids, on the walls of his skull.

Even so, he deemed it Godly intervention when Anders kicked the football too hard, and it flew in that sad, deflated football way over the drab chain link fences of their Catholic school grounds.

Hawke had pushed himself through the gap in the fence bodily, and his eyes fell almost instantly on the ball, cradled under the scratched up arm of a stranger. A stranger in the school’s uniform, Hawke couldn’t help but notice, despite its countless defacements. The stranger had held the ball out accusingly, a single eyebrow raised,

“Is this yours?”

Hawke had nodded, catching the ball in an awkward, jarring way when the stranger had thrown it his way.

“Thanks…what are you doing off school grounds?”

The stranger’s brows knitted together in a thick, harsh angle. The rolled up sleeves of his shirt scathed as he crossed his arms, his blazer – tied around his waist – shaking at the cock of a hip.

“What are you doing off school grounds?”

“Ha ha, fair enough.” Hawke held the ball in two hands, and looked at it the like he’d never seen it before. He returned his gaze to the stranger, who was tucking strands of dark brown hair behind his ears – his fingers were streaked with mud. “Fancy a kick about?”

“I’m good.” The stranger said, and his hands fell to his pockets, fingers of his right hand searching for something within its depths, “You might want to get back. Lunch will be over soon.”

Hawke had in fact returned to the yard, his eyes lingering perhaps too long on the strange boy who lurked in the straggly undergrowth beyond the school grounds. He’d watched him sit down against the trunk of a crumpled old tree, raising the cigarette he’d pulled from his pocket to his lips.

Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man, but at the age of fifteen, he’d considered the existence of angels.

It was by no coincidence that at fifteen years old Hawke had taken his first wary step into a veritable no man’s land of ‘suddenly becoming very hairy’ and ‘which gender am I supposed to be attracted to again?’.

Catholic school with its strict policy of close-mindedness and homophobia was in some way performing actions opposite to its original intentions. There was a physical reaction somewhere, a prickling heat about an all-boys school’s nature that, to its very core, was little more than arousing to the mind of a teenaged boy with his entire life ahead of him.

Hawke was no exception to this rule, and he made a habit of being the last changed after P.E, because he spent far too long lingering with his shirt half over his shoulders, watching the other boys get dressed. “Not religious. Not affected by this school’s ideas and ethos.” He continued to tell himself, despite feeling wrong for letting his eyes wander for too long.

He remembered the day Sebastian had caught on, and had been forced to endure almost half an hour of, “You’re gay, and that’s okay.” From an annoyingly luxurious Scottish accent.

Returning to the dorms that night had been difficult, because despite Anders and Varric brushing their teeth in the bathroom – note the door they make habit to leave wide open – Sebastian had once again decided that maybe Hawke needed to talk about it.

Hawke had firmly decided that he did not need to talk about it, and had hurled himself into the top bunk – much to Varric’s dismay.

Hawke did not see the strange boy again until one lunch time, when Sebastian was at choir practice, Anders was sick and cooped up in their dorm reading comic books, and Varric had detention for flicking paint at Cullen during third period art class.

He had been sitting alone at a table in the yard, his eyes straining over the pages of a book. Hawke had announced his arrival by softly bouncing a familiar football on the old wood of the table. The stranger had looked up with a dangerous glint.

“Hi.” Hawke’s voice sounded like water falling through a sieve.

“…Hello.” The stranger said, and he slipped a pressed coin between the pages of his book to keep his place. “Have you lost track of another football?”

Hawke laughed softly, “No. You just looked a little lonely.” He rolled his shoulders as he sat, splaying his fingers over the top of the ball in an eagle spread. The stranger watched the movement closely, “I too have an unfortunate lack of friends this lunch period.”

The stranger’s eyes narrowed in a judging way, searching Hawke as if looking for an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. Hawke noticed the stranger’s eyes were green.

“My name’s Hawke.” Hawke offered his hand to the boy, who didn’t take it.

“Fenris.” The boy said, his eyes flitting between one hand offered for shaking and another spread over the surface of a football, “Hawke sounds like a surname.”

“It is.” Hawke said, “My first name is Garrett. I don’t know why people started calling me Hawke, it kind of just stuck.”

The stranger – Fenris – didn’t reply.

“…Fenris is a nice name.”

Still nothing.

Hawke sucked the inside of his cheek between his teeth and set his jaw. Rolling the football between his hands, he stood and made his way around the table, towards the rickety green goals that swayed in the light wind at the end of the yard.

“I’m going for a kick about. Feel free to join me.”

Fenris did not join him that lunchtime, but exactly a week later, when it was unseasonably warm for March, he sat beside the small pitch that Varric had put together with removed blazers, and pretended he wasn’t watching their game.

Anders’ hands were studded with gravel from the amount of times he’d dove for the sake of being a goalie. Sebastian demanded time out when Anders sliced his hand open on a particularly nasty fall, bracing himself on a sharp rock. Hawke became a mother hen for about five seconds before Anders insisted he was fine and applied a large plaster to his hand. Varric questioned why Anders kept plasters in his trouser pocket. Anders said it was important to be prepared.

Varric, Anders and Sebastian left to fill up their water bottles before the end of lunch, and Hawke stood – holding the ever present football – in front of a begrudging Fenris.

“You’re on the same page you were when I asked you to play last week.” Hawke pointed out bluntly.

Fenris snapped his gaze up in a way that made Hawke’s heart stop beating for a second – that is to say, in a way that was equally terrifying as it was scandalously attractive.

“How can you tell?” Fenris sneered.

Hawke knelt down and pointed at the very top of the page.

“Chapter five.” He said calmly, “You were on chapter five last time too.”

Fenris said nothing, but held Hawke’s glare with a displeased turn to his lips.

“Having too much fun watching something else?” Hawke raised his eyebrows in succession and Fenris scoffed, closing his book with a thunderous clap and stuffing it inside his satchel. Hawke made to laugh, but the noise stopped in throat as Fenris rose to leave.

“Hey! Hey, I was joking!”

Fenris didn’t look back as he walked towards the main doors.

It was lunch time the next day, in the library, that Fenris confronted Hawke with a hesitant frown.

Varric and Anders were in an aisle opposite, arguing over which Harry Potter book was better. Sebastian was talking to the librarian about the book he’d been fined for despite returning it on time. Hawke was thankful he was alone at this point, maths homework spread before him in a monochrome peacock’s tail.

“I’m dyslexic.”

“I’m sorry?”

Fenris sighed.

“That’s why I was still on chapter five. I’m dyslexic.”

“Oh…”

Fenris pulled out a chair opposite Hawke, placing the book on the table in front of him. He stared at it with both a palpable hate and a wordless wonder. Hawke felt a thick tension in the air between them.

“I…I want to finish it. But I can’t. I want to know what happens but I can barely register what happened three pages ago.” Fenris fisted a hand into his hair, “I can write and spell perfectly but the moment someone asks me to read out loud or…or even in my head, I just…I can’t do it.”

This moment felt raw in a bloody way. A torn flesh way. This moment in time was like an open wound and Hawke felt queasy at the sight of blood – or perhaps just at the sight of attractive boys with angry faces.

“So there. Now you know.”

Fenris sat back in his chair, shoulders peaked, and opened the book as though rebelling. His eyes returned to that narrow, squinting line, and his lips twitched as if sounding out words beneath his breath. Hawke felt like he couldn’t finish his homework.

When the others returned to the table, Varric was – as always – ready to ask questions in the most joking way possible, but Hawke silenced him with a familiar, “You are my best friend but I am willing to put that aside and punch you.” stare.

The others kept sensible as they helped Hawke with his homework and Fenris read silently opposite them.

Hawke was pleasantly surprised to find that, when Varric actually talked to Fenris for the first time, he was able to draw a fought smirk from him. After a few minutes Fenris was even joking cautiously back. Hawke sat in awe, mouth full of the awful Wednesday pasta, as Varric and Fenris bounced off each other as if they’d known each other for years. Sebastian gave the odd addition to conversation, and Anders held himself in a crouched way over his lunch. His eyes fell in an uncertain glower to Fenris.

Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man, but he was beginning to witness miracles on a weekly basis.

He became a constant in their group, though he was in none of their classes and they had no idea where his dorm was, Fenris had integrated seamlessly. It was like he’d always been there.

He came like fog almost, or the light filtering through classroom windows when Hawke was too tired to listen to what the teacher was saying. In the same way that hazy afternoon light did, Fenris obscured Hawke’s vision, made him light headed and dizzy, but made him warm and tired and lazy.

When the Easter holidays rolled in Hawke and Fenris were the last people waiting outside school. All the other parents had come and gone, picked up their children with bright smiles and chatty demeanours, and driven away in their shiny foreign cars that denoted their class just as much as the fact that their children went to a private, all-boys, Catholic school.

“My mum’s always late.” Hawke laughed, “She’s got it in her head that we finish at four and no matter how many times I tell her it’s three twenty she always picks me up at four.”

Fenris didn’t say anything.

“Why are your parents late?”

“I…uh, I won’t be leaving till tomorrow.”

“You won’t? Why not?”

Fenris tugged at the collar of his jacket – it was the last day of term so they’d been allowed to wear their own clothes, something usually reserved for weekends alone. Hawke had held his breath and felt a pressure in his chest when he’d seen Fenris that morning; tight jeans, tight shirt and loose black bomber jacket.

He still felt a little breathless looking at him.

“My, uh, my adoptive father is a deputy head for the school.” He explained, a little heavily from the back of his throat. “He’s at a meeting today so he’ll be picking me up tomorrow morning.”

“…Where do you live?”

“Middle of nowhere.” Fenris snorted, “Honestly though, some place in the country that I can’t pronounce the name of. It’s so empty. I prefer being at school sometimes because the house is just so…big. And lonely.”

“Oh.”

Hawke’s mother arrived at ten minutes to four, and Hawke said goodbye to Fenris as he did up his seatbelt. Fenris waved half-heartedly. Hawke watched the school disappear, head stuck out of the window like a dog.

When they returned to school after the holiday, Fenris made his mark in a way that caught two different types of attention.

For one, he’d dyed his hair white. Hawke found that it didn’t catch his eye so much as it did everyone else’s. Hawke noticed the fading black eye first, and the purple bruises on his neck – partially hidden by a now constantly popped collar.

Fenris caught Hawke looking at the bruises more than once, and shifted uncomfortably when he did. They took weeks to fade.

Hawke didn’t mention them, mostly worried that he would strike a bad chord. It didn’t stop him from worrying, however, or thinking about that big, lonely house where he lived. In the middle of nowhere.

“Why’d you dye your hair?” Hawke asked one lunchtime through a mouthful of tuna sandwich.

They sat together among the foliage, just beyond school grounds where Fenris had first picked up Anders’ run away football. Fenris smoked like a bad wood campfire, at least when teachers were out of sight, and Hawke breathed in the second hand smoke with no complaint. There was a thrilling sensation of insurgency that came with his mouth filling up with ash. He thought of the undeniable disapproval his mother would express, the ‘NO SMOKING’ signs in huge red letters hung up all over school, the pictures of decomposing lungs on the back of the pack that Fenris somehow kept secret in his blazer pocket.

It was an adrenaline rush even if he’d never physically brought a cigarette to his lips.

“Same reason I smoke.”

“And that’s…?”

“The small acts of rebellion.”

Hawke laughed, tilting his head to Fenris.

“I can understand smoking, but how is dying your hair rebellion?”

“You haven’t met my adoptive father.” Fenris’ tone was surprisingly cold as he flicked his cigarette into the dirt and ground it down with his heel.

Hawke tried hard to ignore the way Fenris’ fingers trailed to his neck.

On the first day of June it felt like the middle of August, and everyone’s skin was sticking to their clothes. It felt like swimming through molten sugar.

Unbeknownst to the teachers, Hawke and Fenris had hidden in the only fully air-conditioned room in the school during lunch period. It was a study room really, used rarely and only by the sixth form students for their free study periods. It was still stuffy, despite being cooler than everywhere else, with its dusty carpets and sagging armchairs.

Hawke sat beneath an open window, watching the door. Fenris sat beside him, and, using angles to their advantage, they had propped an armchair just ahead of them, so if anyone were to enter they could simply roll behind and wait for them to leave.

Fenris’ head was lolled back, and Hawke could see a new bruise on his neck. He was curious to the point of losing sleep about what he assumed were hickeys. He knew that there were other ways to acquire bruises on one’s neck, but their shape was so distinctively teeth and tongue that Hawke almost felt jealous of whoever put them there.

“Sebastian loves this room.” Hawke said to tear his mind away from that thought. Giving Fenris love bites. What a thought it was. “It’s the painting on the wall.”

Hawke gestured to the huge portrait on the wall above the empty fireplace. A sedate Jesus Christ stared out of the canvas with deep brown eyes, brown lips pursed into the smallest of smiles. The painting was all crisp brush strokes and dramatic shadows. The lamb that Christ held curled up in his arms had always looked dead to Hawke.

“We came here once to do a test because there weren’t enough desks left in class to seat everyone separately.” Hawke explained, “I finished early because I couldn’t even understand half the questions in the stupid thing. The painting…looked at me. You know? It was so eerie. Seb loves it though. Bring it up next time we all hang out, Varric makes some great puns about it.”

Fenris stared at the painting with a scrupulous eye.

“His beard is a slightly different colour to his hair.”

Hawke raised an eyebrow, a hand instinctively flying to his chin where a young, teenaged beard was beginning to flourish. He was right. Jesus’ beard was in fact a few shades lighter than his hair.

“Wow. I’d never noticed that before.” Hawke said. “That’s kind of annoying.”

Hawke kept looking at the painting, but he was suddenly hyper aware of Fenris’ eyes on him.

He felt brave for a split second.

“Why did you have a black eye on the first day of term?”

Fenris’ eyes didn’t leave Hawke, even as he met his gaze.

The stare was a tangible concept between them, and Hawke felt hot suddenly. The entire room felt hot.

He wondered if he’d got the wrong room, and it was actually a room on the other side of the building that had proper air conditioning.

Fenris’ voice brought him back to reality,

“I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to.” Fenris sighed.

“…Why not?”

“Because I know you, Hawke.” Fenris’ stare finally left Hawke, and he looked at the palms of his hands, “If I told you, you’d demand we do something about it and you’d only get yourself into trouble because of it.”

He took a long breath.

“I don’t want that.”

“Then at least convince me I have nothing to worry about.”

There were no words as Fenris reached out shakily; an arm snaking around Hawke’s neck so gently, as if scared of snapping it completely. Their lips didn’t meet at first, not before Fenris pressed his forehead to Hawke’s. His eyes couldn’t have been half lidded for more than three seconds before he closed them completely and touched his lips to Hawke’s.

The heat was unbearable, and Hawke moved like he may never be able to again. His arms were around Fenris’ waist in the first twenty seconds, three minutes in and he was leaning Fenris gently down onto the floor, seven minutes and they were breathless, pressed against each other in the most innocent form of intimacy.

It was a sad scene: two boys, holding each other like drunkards do their bottles, heavy boned on the floor of a Catholic school. Jesus Christ watching over them, his dead lamb held in loose embrace and a smile not leaving his face for disappointment nor disgust.

They did not move until the lunch bell rang, and they parted to different classes with a soft kiss hidden in the shadows of an open door.

Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man, but he felt original sin heavy in the very marrow of his bones.

On Saturday night Hawke had planned to meet Anders, Varric and Sebastian in the recreation room to watch Lord of the Rings and play cards. Fenris had been invited to, and he trailed softly behind Hawke as they walked, their fingers interlaced. Hawke looked back to Fenris every now and then, smiling softly. Fenris smiled back, but it did not reach his eyes.

They passed a cluster of dorm room doors, and a thought occurred to Hawke – something he’d never thought to ask before.

“Where’s your dorm?” Hawke asked.

He stopped walking, and Fenris did too, catching his other hand in a soft hold. He looked around quickly to make sure no one was looking, and pressed a gentle kiss to Hawke’s lips.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I asked where your dorm was.” Fenris froze.

“My…my dorm?”

His eyes flickered towards the hall to the west wing, and Hawke raised an eyebrow. Fenris shook his head.

“It, uh, it doesn’t matter.” Fenris released his grip on Hawke’s hands, “Come on, Anders is probably complaining about how late we are, again.”

Hawke didn’t follow Fenris straight away, and instead made a cautious step towards the west wing hall. A sign was nailed to the wall:

_West Wing_

_Communal Showers_

_Humanities Classrooms_

_Teachers’ Dorms_

“Are you coming?”

“Yes! Sorry, Fenris.”

Fenris, Hawke noticed, had a habit of squeezing his thighs together when he was uncomfortable. He squirmed and crossed his arms tight. His knees would draw together and he would seemingly sink into his lower body. Sometimes he wouldn’t move his arms, or the squirming would be less obvious, but Hawke could always see the way he pressed one thigh against the other when he was dragged out of his comfort zone.

Hawke never brought it up.

Nor did he bring up the fact that with every fading bruise on his neck, another would appear – slightly bigger, or a slightly darker, or slightly lower down his collar bone.

Were Hawke to share habits with Fenris then his thighs would be incredibly friendly at this point.

The summer holidays were less than a week away, and Hawke had almost completely packed his suitcase. He sat on his bed in the dorm, reading his book with jittery hands. Varric had reclaimed the top bunk and was writing away as he usually did, throwing pages Sebastian’s way and asking him to proof read them.

“I already got my pen pal to read through them last week but all she said was ‘more frontal nudity’.”

Sebastian snorted.

“Maybe you should take Isabela’s advice.” Hawke laughed.

“Maybe you shouldn’t assume that I haven’t added more frontal nudity.”

“You’re all disgusting.” Anders commented, exiting the bathroom with a plastic bag full of toiletries. He put them in his suitcase and glanced at Sebastian,

“Don’t tell me you’re actually going to read them?”

Sebastian shrugged.

The night before the last day of term Hawke told Fenris he could stay the night in their dorm.

“I won’t stay the night, but I’ll come for a few hours.” He’d said at the offer, and arrived at quarter past eight looking incredibly dishevelled and smelling like cigarette ash and cheap alcohol.

“Have you been drinking?” Hawke had whispered in his ear whilst the others were too distracted by an enthusiastic argument about whether or not algebra was actually that important in day to day life.

“No. Why?”

“You stink of, like…cheap wine or something”

“Oh. I hadn’t – hadn’t noticed.”

Fenris was still there by morning, wrapped up in an old sleeping bag on the floor between Hawke and Anders’ beds. Hawke shook him awake gently, and though greeting him with a sleep bleared smile his only reply was wide eyes and a furrowed brow.

“Did I fall asleep?”

“Well…well yes, I didn’t want to wake you.”

Hawke was never given an explanation for that morning – though in later years he could begin to guess – when Fenris sat bolt upright as though being electrocuted, and scrambled out of the dorm with the demeanour of a frightened deer.

Only at lunch did Hawke manage to find him, tucked away with a cigarette and a book, holding an often doled out icepack to a reddening cheek. Hawke sat beside him silently amongst the thistles, nursing his water bottle between his lips. He picked at the cap with his teeth, listening to the click, gently accompanying the weary sighs with which Fenris exhaled each puff of black smoke.

“If you’re going to ask why I left this morning…”

“Well, I can’t say I didn’t want to.” Hawke turned to Fenris in a stony way, his face set in neutral and chest turned towards him. Fenris looked frozen for a second, a caged animal weighing up its chances of escape or slaughter.

He eventually took a last drag of his cigarette and flicked it off somewhere into the distance.

“If I tell you this, Hawke, I can’t say that you’ll ever get to see me again.” Fenris said, barely above a whisper. “At least not properly. Telling you this may be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Why…” Hawke could feel his throat swelling up, dry and closing in, predatory and unforgiving. “Why wouldn’t I get to see you? Fenris, what do you mean?”

“I don’t even know myself half the time it’s…” Fenris grabbed his face with both hands, breathing heavily into his own eagle grip. His knuckles were turning white, “He always finds out. Somehow. Whenever I try and help myself he always finds out and then we just disappear all over again.”

Hawke couldn’t quite tell in the light, whether the soft silvery tracks running down Fenris’ face were tears or sweat – a mark of stress one way or another. He found himself becoming a wall, a fortress of sorts, arms like steel coming around Fenris, holding him there, holding him close, still, safe.

“I still don’t understand.” He whispered to Fenris neck, thinking of the bruises there. What they meant. “Who is ‘he’?”

Fenris’ voice cracked like a gunshot, killing something soft and small – possibly something that lay inside both him and Hawke.

“Hawke, just think about things for once.” He creaked out, as if he were a floorboard, the pressure on his shoulders being intensified over and over, “I’ve tried so hard to tell you without telling you. I’ve been holding out for you to figure things out on your own so that when all this finally gets out he can’t blame me for ‘telling tales’.”

The desperation with which Fenris took Hawke’s face into his hands, holding eye contact like breaking it would do the same to every bone in his body, was a force strong enough to fell mountains.

“Is it…is it your adoptive dad?” The words bled out of his lips in the same manner as water, dripping in that uncertain way. Falling to dampen one thing and nourish another.

The cracked sigh that saturated Fenris’ throat was one part thankful, another anguished.

They stayed there, curled around each other, shoulders heaving and cheeks wet, for long past the end of lunch bell. It was the slow burn sort of motion that, when the cold air lifted and the sun removed the clouds from around itself, Hawke rose to his feet with Fenris’ hands in his own. No countable amount of kisses were shared, and Hawke held Fenris’ wrist with a tightness and fondness rivalled only by the intensity of those tight-lipped, closed-minded stares from every parent, teacher and pupil who waited outside the school.

The crowds thinned and thinned, like water being distilled, and when there was no one left but Hawke and Fenris, sitting side by side on those cold, unforgiving stone benches, Hawke finally felt something tight inside his stomach release.

It was three forty five – fifteen minutes until his mother would arrive late.

He slipped his arm around Fenris’ waist.

“So all the bruises,” Hawke said quietly, “The black eyes and the…” his voice stopped dry in his throat for a second, and he had to collect himself as he continued, “The ones on your neck. That was all him?”

Fenris nodded, and in that little way of his, his thighs drew together and squeezed. Hawke wondered why that was, why it was his thighs that brushed and knocked. He built himself into a belt when he did that – holding onto something, something that may or may not have been taken from him a long time ago.

“Why – “

“Please, Hawke.” Fenris rasped, “Please, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Hawke fell silent.

Hawke’s mother pulled into the school car park at four o’clock, and it was with little shame but a lot of nerve that Hawke outright kissed Fenris goodbye in front of her.

He’d already been seen holding hands with him, and according to rumours several children had reported him for being seen kissing Fenris in the trees behind the yard.

Small acts of rebellion.

Catholic school was a dark place, hidden behind the so called light of God, and Hawke left his innocence there when he crawled into his mother’s car and did up his seatbelt, watching it melt into the distance, and feeling a little bit of his heart melt along with it.

Hawke felt pained to say that when he returned to school that September, a suitcase in his hand that wasn’t quite as heavy as his heart, he did not see Fenris. Nor did he see him for that first week spent at school.

In an informative assembly at the end of the week he came to the knowledge that the deputy head had left, and had moved with his son to Europe. Hawke had felt his stomach churn with knowledge that was clawing at his guts.

Life fell back into the everyday swing of things – Varric told more awful jokes and wrote even worse stories; Sebastian’s faith strengthened by the day and he was appointed prefect three months into the first term back; Anders suddenly had his heart set on becoming a doctor and admitted with no small amount of guilt that he actually preferred things when it was just the four of them.

It was at twenty five years old that Hawke saw Fenris again, and he found that despite ten years between them having stretched out like cats in the sun, there was a still a spark there, and now that he was an adult it was even harder to control than before.

The tattoos were new, and although Hawke never asked about them, all he could think was, small acts of rebellion, to himself.

And that was that. He did not approach Fenris, he watched and remembered, and felt his heart tighten a little bit when his childhood flame left the bar on the arm of a gorgeous girl with hair like molasses, seemingly drowning in gold jewellery.

Garrett Hawke had never been a religious man, and he’d never tell a soul about all the prayers he whispered in earnest.

**Author's Note:**

> [a song]  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nVr4Ys8zKM


End file.
